Militia says Iraqi leader out to trick it / Threat of new battle in Baghdad slum where rebels strong

Dexter Filkins, New York Times

Published 4:00 am, Friday, September 3, 2004

2004-09-03 04:00:00 PDT Baghdad -- Leaders of the Mahdi Army declared on Thursday they had been betrayed by Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, who has been trying to lure away the militia's supporters with millions of dollars in government aid.

Yusef Al Nasiri, a senior leader of the insurgent group, said that efforts to renew peace negotiations failed again on Thursday. Nasiri accused Allawi of deliberately stalling, as he tries to isolate the Mahdi Army and block its efforts to disarm and enter democratic politics.

Nasiri raised the prospect of renewed fighting with U.S. forces of the type that has repeatedly engulfed Sadr City, the huge Baghdad neighborhood that forms the main base of the Mahdi Army's support. Negotiations to disarm the militia, which is led by the rebel cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, began last week after the withdrawal of the Mahdi Army from the holy city of Najaf but broke down this week.

"The Iraqi government is not serious, they have ignored our efforts, and now the Americans are driving around Sadr City with their tanks, insulting people and acting aggressively," Nasiri said. "Nobody can guess what is going to happen next."

In Baghdad, Maj. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, commander of the Army's 1st Cavalry Division, also raised the prospect of renewed fighting by saying it was necessary to prevent al-Sadr from rebuilding his militia.

"He's decided the best thing for him to do is to go underground and regroup," Chiarelli told the Associated Press. "We're not going to allow that to happen."

Naisiri's frustration stems not just from the failure to revive the peace talks, but also from the aggressive efforts by Allawi to persuade some of the Mahdi Army's key backers to break with the rebel group and fall in behind the government.

On Tuesday, the same day that Allawi abruptly canceled a peace deal struck with the Mahdi Army, he met with a group of more than 300 prominent leaders from Sadr City and asked them to withdraw their support from the militia. As an inducement, Allawi offered some $300 million in reconstruction projects for the neighborhood.

The meeting ended inconclusively, according to tribal sheikhs who were there, but the prospect of millions of dollars in aid sparked excited discussions throughout the area. Sadr City, a vast and impoverished area of Baghdad, has as many as 3 million people.

The strategy employed by Allawi toward the Mahdi Army, which is Shiite, mirrors the one he is pursuing toward the Sunni-driven insurgency north and west of Baghdad. In those areas, Allawi is trying to coax members of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party into the political mainstream, while he tries to isolate and crush hard-core Islamic fundamentalists, considering them irredeemable.

So far, the strategy in the Sunni areas has failed. Several former Baathist leaders who tried to reach accommodations with Allawi's government have been killed, and the Islamic fundamentalists, in places like Fallujah and Ramadi, have tightened their grip.

With the Mahdi Army, Allawi is hoping that Sadr City's tribal leaders harbor little enthusiasm for al-Sadr and that they support him largely because they have no alternative.

But Allawi is pursuing a risky course: He could incite the Mahdi Army or set off strife with the Shiites in Baghdad.

In another development, a militant group run by a Jordanian-born insurgent released a videotape showing its members killing three men identified as Turkish hostages, according to Al-Jazeera television network, which broadcast portions of the tape Thursday.

Shortly afterward, police near the city of Samarra said they had discovered the bodies of two slain Turkish citizens and an unidentified man. It was not immediately clear whether the three dead men were the same as those shown in the video.

Al-Jazeera said it had received a statement claiming responsibility for the killing of the three Turks from Monotheism and Holy War, a group run by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, one of the most sought-after militants in Iraq who is accused of a string of bombings, kidnappings and other attacks in Iraq.

Meanwhile, Ismail Taher Mohsin, an Iraqi driver employed by the Associated Press, was fatally shot in an ambush near his home in Baghdad, the news service reported.

Despite the killings, a team of French envoys expressed hope that they would be able to free two kidnapped French journalists held by an extremist Sunni Muslim group.

The editor of the French newspaper Le Figaro told a French radio station Thursday that the kidnapped journalists -- Christian Chesnot and Georges Malbrunot -- had been handed over to a group of militants that has said it is in favor of releasing them.

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